Hi everyone,

I am a master thesis student investigating the applicability of Autofetch-technology (see links) in real world scenarios. There is a tool developed for this in Hibernate. However, it seems like the tool is legacy (developed for version 3.1) and the systems that I'm going to use in the thesis are using newer versions of Hibernate (4.x and 5.x). So before I can start evaluating the method in real world scenarios, I need to somehow port the tool to the versions used in the projects that I will investigate in the study. Since I don't have any background developing in Hibernate I ask you instead. Is Hibernate backwards compatible with older tool versions? If no, how extensive would the work be to update the current tool into the newer versions of Hibernate?

If someone with experience could explain a little bit about this it would be highly appreciated.

If someone wants to contribute to the project: https://github.com/ErikJonasson/Autofetch

For you who don't know about Autofetch:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoFetch

The source code of the tool:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/autofetch/?source=directory

The original autofetch article:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/papers/AutoFetch/autofetch.pdf

Have a great day everyone,
Erik

Hi Erik,

There are things that have changed since Hibernate 3.1 since we are talking about more than a decade of development on the framework.

If you follow the migration guides, it should be easy to port the tool to the latest Hibernate version.

I think it would be nice to have it on GitHub. I'd love to follow your progress on this topic.

Vlad

Hi again,

Thanks Vlad for your answer. I have some doubts about how to work with this regarding to workflow etc, since this is the first big development process for me. I've been trying to integrate the tool to the one of the projects using Hibernate 4.x and trying to run the tool to basically see where the incompatabilites come up and do the changes from there. However the problem is that I don't know whether the problems occuring during runtime is due to configuration errors (the project is a pretty big one with many different modules) or just incompatabilites. As expected, the compilation crashes immidiatelly due to an exception, e.g. a nullpointer-exception in the org.apache.commons.logging.impl.LogFacturyImpl.getLogConstructor(). This got me thinking maybe it would be wise to make the projects to Maven projects to at least make the dependencies easier, but I am not sure. How would you do it if you were doing the migration? It feels like I'm stumbling around in the dark here, some advice would be highly appreciated.

Thanks,
Erik

Adding Maven to simplify dependency management sounds like a good idea.

Also, make it a GitHub project to attract other contributors.

I have made it a GitHub project, is there somewhere on the new forums where I could write and make people aware of it's existence?

Also, is the approach of working with the tool on the target project that I want to make it compatible with an feasible way to migrate and test the changes I make? Any other suggestions that might make things easier for me?

Thanks again,
Erik

You didn't share the repository URL or mentioned it in this thread.



I can't tell because I didn't study what the AutoFetch project does.

Well I meant if there is a certain page or so on the new forum where you can post your projects that people might be interested in contributing to. I edited the original post, so people can find it here atleast.

I thought about general advice about the workflow when migrating. I've found it pretty difficult to test, and that's why I asked. :)

Thanks again,
Erik

No, there is no such page, but, if you write an article about what you want to do on your blog, then I'm going to share it in our Newsletter and people will know about your project.

Send me a link with the story behind your current effort and I'll share it in the next edition of our Newsletter.



Other than debugging every issue you get, I don't know what advice to give you.

Alright, that sounds great. I will get back to you. Thanks for your time!

Sure thing. By the way, when you have the article, please write a new entry on our new forum:

https://discourse.hibernate.org/

We are going to lock this one, as stated in the big banner above.